N.K. Murray

I spent my Friday night mowing my back lawn in the dark, wiping tears that blurred my vision so completely that I was certain I would wake up this morning to a shit show mess of grass tufts and too-shorn edges. I would like to say it wasn’t intentional, but I can’t. It needed to be done, and I hadn’t done it in over a week, and so I walked around and around in circles mowing my lawn in the dark…

“Whoever is bruised fear not the blade.”Lailah Gifty Akita You know what they say about the best laid plans. I am sitting here in the Whistler Public Library while the group I came with (minus one badass lady who fractured her humerus right below its head yesterday) is up on one of the two mountains skiing. To say this trip has been a challenge for me would be an understatement. . . I have…

The purpose of pruning is to improve the quality of the roses, not to hurt the bush – Florence Littauer I stopped deadheading my roses last year. As I sit here looking uphill at another year, I can honestly say this last year was one of the worst. Getting out of bed in the morning was a success on the really bad days. There were more days during this year where I told myself that remembering to…

I have started to write this 100 times. The thoughts, my thoughts bounced around in my head, dancing with my demons, and generally creating a swarm of letters that meant nothing.  That murder hornet-like swarm of nothing didn’t just buzz around annoyingly – hell, if it had, I likely would have been okay with it. Instead, it became this cacophony of screamed nonsense getting louder and louder…

I realize I posted my last alphabet series indicating that I was going to go out of order, but also not realizing that I might move directly towards ‘E’ after ‘F’. My ‘E’ is both a universal one, and a wholly personal one. Everest I have been low-key obsessed with the Mountain since I was a kid and heard about the ’96 disaster, and read John Krakauer’s original outside piece, and then read…

Fire that’s kept closest burns most of all.Shakespeare – The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Nikki note – I’m starting a series of posts by choosing one letter of the alphabet, and a word beginning with that letter. They won’t be in order, because I clearly prefer chaos, but it’s a great way for me to self-cattle prod to write more.) Today’s post will be about the letter ‘F’. For those of you who know…